With these three discs CPO have made major inroads into a project
to record a complete Panufnik Orchestral Edition. Good to see
that CPO are doing for Panufnik what Naxos are doing for Lutoslawski.
In a few years time the chances are that we may have the completed
set issued in a slipcase just as CPO have done for Sallinen.

What marks out Panufnik as distinctive. His textures are not
complex. He had the courage to populate his scores sparsely
leaving his material to be judged without distraction. Long
lyrical lines arc and arch, twist slowly and stretch and writhe
in ecstatic absorption. Minatory bass ostinati drive progress
forwards as on occasion do pizzicato cells for the strings.
These successfully incite rapping brass and percussion. His
writing for brass is a thing of magnificence. Extremes of loud
and quiet are juxtaposed as they are for example in the Piano
Concerto and the desperately under-recognised Sinfonia
Elegiaca(the Second).

The Sinfonia Mistica reflects these characteristics
decades after the Sinfonia Sacra. The harmonic language
is only marginally more subtle than in the Rustica and
Sacra. Some of the slow blooming music verges on being
Delian. The Mistica can be heard, with the di Sfere,
in a contemporary analogue recording by the LSO and David Atherton
on Explore.
The present recording is more transparent and is recorded with
proximity impact on a more generously timed CD. Autumn
Music is in three episodes and at one time could be
found on a Unicorn CD UKCD2016 that also included Tragic
and Heroic overtures, Nocturne, Autumn Music, London Symphony
Orchestra conducted by Jascha Horenstein in 1970. It’s a work
of chilly opacity and some violence. Drum and piano are to the
fore in the later two sections. The five movements of Hommage
à
Chopin are derived from five vocalises for soprano and piano.
This is haunting but very approachable. The music is original
and uses Polish folk material to pay tribute to Chopin. Much
of it is introspective but it has its energetic moments in the
spiny rhythmic penultimate movement. Rhapsody is related to
Autumn Music in its oblique language though the surging hymnal
fingerprint is rampant in the last section.

The Sinfonia Rustica is an early work and was
recorded first by the composer with the Monte Carlo Opera Orchestra
in 1966 – at first appearing on EMI then Unicorn and more recently
on EMI
again. It at times recalls a sort of Polish Copland. It is very
folksy yet sensitively painted and proportioned. The finale
proceeds with huge energy and gripping pulsation. With the Sacra
and the two early overtures on volume 1 it forms the ideal
introduction to Panufnik. Here we also get the plangent first
version of the Con espressione movement of Rustica.
The Sinfonia Concertante dates from a quarter
century later by which time the composer had long had to leave
his native Poland to settle in England – for some years he was
conductor of the CBSO. This three movement symphony has a central
movement which has extruded echoes of his rhythmically driven
central movements. This one is grimly redolent of Shostakovich.
It is strange and oddly shaped. Polonia is a rude
contrast – we are taken back to ancient Polish folk music and
folk dances. Again some of these seem to reference cowboy Copland
but with a more raucous dissonant tang. The piece was inspired
by Elgar’s Polonia – rife with Polish patriotic songs
- which Panufnik conducted during his time with the CBSO. One
of Panufnik’s Polonia movements deploys his trademark
high-keening violins which can be heard again in the almost
expressionist Lullaby spun slowly over an iterated
dripping harp figure. It’s magical – again almost Delian but
softly dissonant and otherworldly. It ends in a slowly descending
harp glitter.

Panufnik made his name as a composer with the Tragic Overture
and the Heroic Overture. I recall being captivated
by them when they were used as signature tunes for some BBC
Radio 4 serial in the early 1970s. In the Tragic Overture
an irate little note cell keeps things restless. A lyrical
and even sentimental idea often allotted to flute and other
solo instruments sings above the terror of that ruthless little
cell. Towards the end it is as if the battle between orchestra
and side drum in Nielsen’s Fifth is emulated here in notated
form between whooping lyrical paean and the thudding and howling
mindless violence. Here the violence wins – the multiple betrayals
around the Warsaw Uprising? Nocturne - a sort
of contemplation of night scenes from which emerges a grim climax
which then dissipates and returns to the nocturnal miasma. It’s
a long sustained episode running close to 18 minutes. Again
this music of night has a shredded dissonant sweetness carried
by high violins. Heroic Overture is clamorous
but it is a euphorically exciting piece that celebrates heroism
in irresistible terms while not diluting the surrounding slaughter.
It looks back again to those appalling war years the composer
spent in Warsaw from 1941 to 1945. The murder of thousands of
Polish officers in the Katyn forest in 1943 is most movingly
marked in the tragic Katyn Epitaph. Sorrowing
beauty is carried by the searing violins rather than in fanfares.
You need to hear this piece if you already appreciate the Barber
Adagio, the Martinů Lidice Memorial or the
Suk Wenceslas Chorale. A Procession for Peace
was written in 1983 to a commission by the GLC. It has no specific
programme but is dedicated “to peace-loving people of every
political and philosophical creed.” A persistent side-drum establishes
a military reference over which a pacific woodwind chorale rises
and falls. Strings take over the role of the woodwind yet things
end with the lyrical theme rising to grand heights. Momentarily
there’s a touch of Rozsa here. But the brass whoops at the end
are and can only be Panufnik. Harmony was conducted
by the composer at its premiere at the Tilles Center, New York
in 1989. It was dedicated to the composer’s wife Camilla. The
mood is strange, tender, idyllic, Bergian perhaps – it present
s tough aspect and needs repeat hearings.

The notes for all three discs are good and avoid the abstruse
in a way that CPO authors do not always manage.

It would be good to have the withdrawn Symphony for Peace
(the one from which Elegiaca emerged) included in
this Edition. Let’s hope that it is possible if the family is
willing and if the materials have survived or can be prepared.

This is an admirable series full of refreshing subtlety: old
friends and new discoveries.

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